Guangxi’s Green City between hills and border trade
Nanning, capital of China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is nicknamed the Green City for its lush subtropical parks. It lies in a hilly basin about 160 kilometres from the Vietnamese border, and its history as an administrative seat stretches back some 1,700 years.
The area once belonged to the Baiyue peoples. In 318, under the Eastern Jin, Jinxing County was set up here, and in 632 the Tang renamed it Yongzhou, which is why the city is still called Yong for short. During the Lý–Song War of 1076, Vietnamese Lý forces besieged Yongzhou; the garrison under Su Jian held out for forty-two days before the city fell, was razed and its people massacred. The Yuan gave it the name Nanning in 1324.
Trade shaped the city from early on, with merchants from other parts of China keeping permanent offices here since the Song. By the Ming it had become the commercial hub of the Zuo and You river valleys and earned the nickname Little Nanjing. Communist forces took it on 4 December 1949, it was named Guangxi’s capital on 8 February 1950, and it kept that role when the Zhuang Autonomous Region was created in 1958.
Today Nanning acts as China’s gateway to Southeast Asia, hosting the annual China–ASEAN Expo since 2004, and as the main centre for training members of the Zhuang minority. The 2020 census counted about 8.74 million people in the municipality, drawn from 35 ethnic groups including Zhuang, Han, Yao and Miao. Its tallest building, the 402.7-metre Guangxi China Resources Tower, is the highest in southwestern China outside Chongqing, and a metro system has opened four lines since 2016.
The climate is warm and humid, averaging 22.3 °C over the year, with July near 28.5 °C and about 1,286 millimetres of rain, most of it between May and October. More than 3,000 plant species grow in the area; the city tree is the almond and the city flower the jaba, and Qingxiu Mountain rises over the south of town.
Source: Nanning
